Commentary on the so-called Creation/Evolution/Intelligent Design Debate and Right-Wing nuttery in general -
and please ignore the typos (I make lots!)

Thursday, April 15, 2010

R. David Pogge, Christian Creationist Charlatan

Over on one of the many cesspools of ignorance and disinformation, 'scienceagainstevolution.org', Ol' Do-While himself, David Pogge, software engineer and 'expert' on all things having to do with evolution, is up to his old tricks.

An associate emailed him the following:

I was amazed at how readily you demolished the decades of work by Robert Hazen by merely showing how it is all faith, and how software technicians, like yourself, have been "measuring complexity for 30 years."

I was wondering then if you can tell me how to measure the complexity of, say, a dogfish?

Pogge's response - remember, this is the response of a fellow with dozens of essays attacking the 'hoax' of evolution, who presents himself as an expert on complexity and information theory:

Engineers have a method for measuring complexity. It may not be perfect, but it is reasonable and rational.

As far as I know, biologists don't have any way of measuring complexity (other than, "Gee, this looks more complex than that.").

One will note that he does not even attempt a reasoned resply.

If you take the time to actually read some of his essays - or better yet, read some of the exposes of his crap that are on here - you will see why he did not answer the question.

5 comments:

I just want to say thank you for taking on Pogge. I recently came across your older blog entries that point out his deceptions, and I was very happy to have the arguments against them at my fingertips, thanks to you.

I imagine most scientist bloggers find themselves above Pogge's ridiculous writings and therefore don't bother with him, but I have an uncle - whom I debate evolution with - who thinks Pogge is a smart guy who knows what he's talking about. It's blogs like yours that help me show my uncle otherwise.

At the behest of my uncle, I'm actually writing a very belated response to Pogge's "review" of Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. It's almost a year late, but hopefully I'll be able to send it in soon and see if Pogge replies. That review was the first article of Pogge's that I read where I actually had all the information at my fingertips of why he was wrong, because I had just read WEIT the month before. Pogge's complaints against it really are ridiculous.

Pogge is pretty 'low level' in terms of notariety, but I find his writings to be so smug and self-serving - not to mention littered with half-truths, unwarranted extrapolations, and utter nonsense - that I am drawn to them as a motorist to a car wreck.

The more the disinformation from people like Pogge is exposed, the better.